The Case for Cloud Computing The Case for Cloud Computing

Robert L. GrossmanUniversity of Illinois at Chicago and Open Data Group

To understand clouds and cloud computing, we must first understand the two different types of clouds. The author distinguishes between clouds that provide on-demand computing instances and those that provide on-demand computing capacity.

C loud computing doesnt yet have a standard definition, but a good work-ing description of it is to say that clouds, or clusters of distributed computers, provide on-demand resources and services over a network, usually the Internet, with the scale and reliability of a data center. This article gives a quick introduction to cloud computing. It covers several different types of clouds, describes whats new about cloud computing, and discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages that clouds offer.

Two different but related types of clouds are those that provide computing instances on de-mand and those that provide computing capacity on demand. Both use similar machines, but the first is designed to scale out by providing addi-tional computing instances, whereas the second is designed to support data- or compute-intensive applications via scaling capacity.

Amazons EC2 services (www.amazon.com/ec2) are an example of the first category. A small EC2 computing instance costs US$0.10 per hour and offers the approximate computing power of a 1.0- to 1.2-GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor, with 1.7 Gbytes memory, 160 Gbytes

of available disk space, and moderate I/O perfor-mance. The Eucalyptus system (http://eucalyp-tus.cs.ucsb.edu) is an open source option that provides on-demand computing instances and shares the same APIs as Amazons EC2 cloud.

Googles MapReduce is an example of the sec-ond category. Recent work gives a glimpse of it in actionin this case, researchers ran a benchmark on a cluster containing approximately 1,800 machines,1 each of which had two 2-GHz Intel Xeon processors, 4 Gbytes memory, and two 160-Gbyte IDE disks. The researchers used MapReduce on the cluster to run the TeraSort benchmark (http://research.microsoft.com/barc/SortBenchmark), the goal of which is to sort 1010 100-byte records (roughly 1 Tbyte of data). The application required approximately 850 seconds to complete on this cluster. The Hadoop system (http://hadoop.apache.org/core) is an open source system that implements MapReduce.

Clouds that provide on-demand computing instances can use these instances to supply soft-ware as a services (SaaS), such as Salesforce.com does with its product, or to provide a platform as a service (PaaS), such as Amazons does with its EC2 product.

The Case for Cloud ComputingThe Case for Cloud Computing

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Cloud Computing

Whats New?Now that weve covered the basics of cloud com-puting, its important to understand whats new about it. On-demand services and resources have been available over the Internet for some time, but todays increased focus on cloud computing is due to three important differences:

Scale . Some companies that rely on cloud com-puting have infrastructures that scale over sev-eral (or more) data centers.Simplicity . Prior to cloud-based computing ser-vices, writing code for high-performance and distributed computing was relatively compli-cated and usually required working with grid-based services, developing code that explicitly passed messages between nodes, and employ-ing other specialized methods. Although sim-plicity is in the eye of the beholder, most people feel that the cloud-based storage service APIs and MapReduce-style computing APIs are rel-atively simple compared to previous methods.Pricing . Cloud computing is often offered with a pricing model that lets you pay as you go and for just the services that you need. For example, if you need an additional 1,000 computing instanc-es for an hour, you pay just for these 1,000 com-puting instances and just for the hour that you use them. No capital expenditure is required.

The impact has been revolutionaryby using the Google File System (GFS) and MapReduce, or the Hadoop Distributed File System with its imple-mentation of MapReduce, its relatively easy for a project to perform a computation over 10 Tbytes of data using 1,000 nodes. Until recently, this would have been out of reach for most projects. Several other changes and improvements have raised cloud computings profile as well.

Private vs. Hosted CloudsThe management, cost, and security of clouds depend on whether an organization chooses to buy and operate its own cloud or to obtain cloud services from a third party. A private cloud is de-voted to a single organizations internal use; it might be run by the organization itself or out-sourced to a third party to operate. Similarly, a private cloud might be owned by the organization itself or leased by the organization. In contrast, a public or hosted cloud is managed by another or-

ganization that provides cloud services to a va-riety of third-party clients using the same cloud resources. Google, for example, uses GFS,2 MapReduce,3 and BigTable4 internally as part of its private cloud services; at the time of this writing, these services werent available to third parties. In contrast, hosted cloud services such as Amazons EC2, S3, and SimpleDB are open to anyone with a credit card, even at 3 a.m.

Its important to note that Google uses its pri-vate cloud to provide hosted-cloud-based applica-tions, such as its email and office-based services, to regular outside users.

Elastic, Usage-Based PricingCloud computing is usually offered with a usage-based model in which you pay for just the cloud resources that a particular computation requires. Computations that require additional resources simply request them from the cloud (up to the clouds overall capacity). Sometimes, the terms elastic or utility computing are used to de-scribe this ability of a cloud to provide additional resources when required. Amazons S3 and EC2 use this pricing model.

Organizations, therefore, have several options for obtaining cloud services, including running their own private clouds or buying cloud services from a third party using the elastic, usage-based pricing model. This type of pricing offers two other important advantages as well:

It doesnt require up-front investments; in-stead, as an on-demand service, users pay for capacity as they need it.It lets users access capacity exactly when they need it. For Web 2.0 applications, this means that the model can support 100 users one day and 10,000 the next.

To get a better understanding of utility com-puting, lets assume that you have a requirement to operate 100 servers over the course of three years. One option is to lease them at $0.40 per instance-hour, which would cost approximately

Another option is to buy them. Lets assume the cost to buy each server is $1,500, that you need

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two staff members at $100,000 per year to ad-minister the servers, and that the servers require 150 watts each, with the cost of electricity at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, bringing the yearly cost to operate the 100 servers to $13,140. This op-tion would cost approximately

So, if you were to run the servers at 100 percent utilization, buying the 100 servers is less expen-sive. However, if you were to run them at 75 per-cent utilization or less, using an on-demand style of cloud would be less expensive.

Of courses, these numbers are only estimates, and I havent considered all costs, but even from this simple example, its clear that using a pay-as-you-go utility computing model is preferable for many use cases.

Some Advantages and DisadvantagesCloud computing provides several important benefits over todays dominant model in which an enterprise purchases computers a rack at a time and operates them themselves. First, cloud com-putings usage-based pricing model offers several advantages, including reduced capital expense, a low barrier to entry, and the ability to scale up as demand requires, as well as to support brief surges in capacity. Second, cloud services enjoy the same economies of scale that data centers provide. By providing services at the scale of a data center, its possible to provide operations, business continu-ity, and security more efficiently than can be done when providing these services a rack at a time. For this reason, the unit cost for cloud-based services is often lower than the cost if the services were provided directly by the organization itself. Final-ly, cloud-computing architectures have proven to be very scalablefor example, cloud-based stor-age services can easily manage a petabyte of data, whereas managing this much data with a tradi-tional database is problematic.

Of course, cloud computing has some disad-vantages as well. First, because cloud services are often remote (at least for hosted cloud services), they can suffer the latency- and bandwidth-relat-ed issues associated with any remote application. Second, because hosted cloud services serve mul-

tiple customers, various issues related to multiple customers sharing the same piece of hardware can arise. For example, if one users application compromises the system, it can also compromise applications of other users that share the same system. Also, having data accessible to third par-ties (such as a cloud service provider) can present security, compliance, and regulatory issues.

Parallel Computing over CloudsAt its core, MapReduce is a style of parallel pro-gramming supported by capacity-on-demand clouds. A good illustrating example of how some-thing like MapReduce works is to compute an in-verted index in parallel for a large collection of Web pages stored in a cloud.

Lets assume that each node i in the cloud stores Web pages pi,1, pi,2, pi,3, , and that a Web page pj contains words (terms) wj,1, wj,2, wj,3, . A basic but important structure in information retrieval is an inverted index, that is, a list

(w1; p1,1, p1,2, p1,3, )

(w2; p2,1, p2,2, p2,3, )

(w3; p3,1, p3,2, p3,3, ),

where the list is sorted by the word wj, and asso-ciated with each word wj is a list of all Web pages pi containing that word.

MapReduce uses a programming model that processes a list of pairs to produce another list of pairs. The initial list of pairs is distributed over the nodes in the cloud. In the map phase, each Web page pi is processed independently on its local node to produce an output list of multiple key-value pairs , one for word wj on the page. A partition function h(wj) then assigns each key (a word wj in this example) a machine in the cloud for fur-ther processing. This is called the shuffle phase and, in general, nodes involved in the computa-tion send data to other nodes involved in the com-putation as determined by the partition function h(wj). In the next phasecalled the sort phaseeach node in the cloud sorts the key-value pairs according to the key wj. In the final phasecalled the reduce phasethe key-value pairs with the same key wj are merged to create the inverted

index. So with MapReduce, the programmer de-fines a Map and a Reduce function, whereas the system supplies the Shuffle and Sort functions.3

Lets consider another example: log files that describe an entitys usage of resources. Its impor-tant to analyze log files to identify anomalies that indicate whether a particular resource has been compromised. For small log files, this is easy to do with a database, but, as the size of the log files grows, its difficult to manage them with just a da-tabase. However, clouds can easily manage even very large collections of log files, and MapReduce-style computations can easily identify anomalous patterns indicative of compromises.

SecuritySecurity is an area of cloud computing that pres-ents some special challenges. For hosted clouds, the first challenge is simply that a third party is responsible both for storing the data and se-curing it. On the positive side, third parties can take advantage of economies of scale to provide a level of security that might not be cost-effective

for smaller companies, but a downside is two or more organizations might share the same physi-cal resource and not be aware of it.

For some cloud applications, security is still somewhat immature. Hadoop, for example, doesnt currently have user-level authentication or access controls, although both are expected in a later version. Fortunately, theres no techni-cal difficulty per se in providing these tools for clouds. Sector,5 which also provides on-demand computing capacity, offers authentication, autho-rization, and access controls and, as measured by the TeraSort benchmark, is faster than Hadoop (http://sector.sourceforge.net).

Standards, Interoperability, and BenchmarksOrganizations that develop cloud-based applica-tions have an interest in frameworks that enable applications to be ported easily from one cloud to another and to interoperate with different cloud-based services. For example, with an ap-propriate interoperability framework, a cloud application could switch from one provider to another offering lower cost or a greater range of cloud services.

Amazons APIs (www.aws.amazon.com) have become the de facto standard for clouds that provide on-demand instances. Cloud-based ap-plications that use this API enjoy portability and interoperabilityfor example, Eucalyptus uses these APIs, and applications that run on Amazons EC2 service can in turn run on a Eucalyptus cloud. Unfortunately, for clouds that provide on-demand capacity, portability and interoperability are much more problematic. Hadoop is by far the most prevalent system that provides on-demand capac-ity, but, for instance, it isnt straightforward for a Hadoop MapReduce application to run on another on-demand capacity cloud written in C++.5

Although it might be too early yet for stan-dards to fully emerge, several organizations are attempting them, including an effort by the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (www. cloudforum.org/) and by the Open Cloud Consor-tium (www.opencloudconsortium.org). Service-based frameworks for clouds have also recently debutedfor example, Thrift is a software frame-work for scalable cross-language services devel-opment that relies on a code-generation engine (http://incubator.apache.org/thrift). Thrift makes

Third parties can take advantage of economies of scale to provide a level of security that might not be cost-effective for smaller companies.

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it easier for cloud-based applications to access different storage clouds, such as Hadoop and Sec-tor. A common language could also help by provid-ing an interoperable way for applications to access compute services across several different clouds; so far, several people have attempted to provide a lan-guage for MapReduce-style parallel programming, including some that extend SQL in a way that sup-ports this style of programming, but no single lan-guage has emerged as the clear winner yet.

A closely related challenge is creating a standard that would enable different clouds to interoper-ate. Perhaps the Internets infancy could guide this type of effortat that time, any organization that wanted a network set up its own, so sending data between networks was quite difficult. The introduction of TCP and related Internet proto-cols and standards remedied this situation, but many companies with network products resisted them for some time. Today, were in a somewhat analogous position: although cloud service pro-viders have pushed back a bit on standardizing, the ability of different clouds to interoperate easily would enable an interesting new class of applications.

As with standards and a common language, cloud computing doesnt yet have well-estab-lished benchmarks. The most common meth-od for measuring cloud performance to date is the TeraSort benchmark. For clouds that pro-vide on-demand instances, a recent benchmark called Cloudstone has emerged.6 Cloudstone is a toolkit consisting of an open source Web 2.0 social application, a set of tools for generating workloads, a set of tools for performance moni-toring, and a recommended methodology for computing a metric that quantifies the dollars per user per month that a given cloud requires. For clouds that provide on-demand capacity, a recent benchmark called MalStone (code.google.com/p/malgen/) has emerged as well. MalStone is based on the log file example of a MapReduce computation I described earlier. It includes code to generate synthetic events and a recommended MapReduce computation.

W ith cloud computing, the unit of com-puting has moved from a single com-puter or rack of computers to a data cen-ter of computers. To say it simply, the unit of com-

puting is now the data center. Not only has cloud computing scaled computing to the data center, but it has also introduced software, systems, and programming models that significantly reduce the complexity of accessing and using these resources. Just as significant, with elastic, usage-based pricing models, an individual or organization pays for just those computing instances or computing capac-ity that it requires and only when it requires them. Truly, this is revolutionary.

Robert L. Grossman is a professor of mathematics, sta-tistics, and computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and managing partner at Open Data Group. His research interests include data mining and analytics, distributed computing, and high-performance networking. Grossman has a PhD in applied mathematics from Princ-eton University. Contact him at grossman at uic.edu.